Read Online The Telling by Alexandra Sirowy - Free Book Online Page A

wait-and-see of earlier. Their comfort and optimistic promise carry me into my house. Basel, Ben’s tabby cat, meets me at the front door and runs figure eights around my ankles as I double- and then triple-check that I’ve set the house alarm.
    Although she’s the last person I want to think about as I get ready for bed, I can’t stop seeing Maggie’s glowing figure on the dark rocks of the spring. In death she looked like the powerful villain I knew she was.
    During those twenty-eight days when I let sadness swallow me up, I also let guilt in. How hadn’t I seen what Maggie was capable of? I’d thought she was ordinary, nothing more than an alternative girl who liked thinking she was original but was actually a cliché. She wore safety pins in her ears rather than earrings. She had mostly wannabe-hippie friends, and when she wasn’t with Ben, she hung out with the kids who thought they were all political and enlightened because they wore hemp jewelry and ate pot brownies at reggae shows in the city. She scribbled all over her clothing in Wite-Out and Sharpie: M + B , or MAGGIE MCBROOK , or B+M 4EVER . She wasn’t subtle.
    Ben was the first boyfriend she kept longer than a few months. Before him she’d mostly dated older guys, the kind who hung out in their cars behind the school tennis courts, waiting to sell kids substances in paper bags. Maggie’s exploits were the kind that pinched-nose cheerleaders thought were outrageous, even though they weren’t different from what their football-playing boyfriends got up to.
    Most of all, Maggie was jealous. If Maggie saw Ben talking to a girl in school, she’d rush up and chase the girl off and then get into a yelling match with Ben. If Maggie suspected Ben was getting texts or calls from girls, his phone would disappear. During their senior year Ben stopped going to parties with Maggie at all because they’d had so many blowups.
    I don’t get why Ben put up with it. He’d say, She’s passionate or I don’t mind fighting or She hates Gant as much as I do . That was it. Theyrailed on Gant together. She had an outsider’s perspective too. She could roll her eyes and go on about the beastly waterfront houses. The only difference was that Ben lived in one of them.
    Ben and I would glide into the harbor after a day on the Mira and he’d shout, mock emphatically, “ Gant , the idyllic island where the millionaires of Seattle flock with their 2.4 kids, labradoodles, and trophy wives. Gant, where shit doesn’t stink and bullshit is recyclable, where everyone gets to be white, rich, and an asshole.” It was theatrical and true.
    Ben probably hated himself a little for it. There he was, on the deck of a sailboat , complaining to his cashmere-clad stepsister about the kids at school who only got jobs driving carts at the course because they were bored. We didn’t have jobs, period. I heard Maggie call Ben a hypocrite a bunch of times.
    If I hadn’t been so busy being jealous in the way only a younger sibling can be, maybe I would have seen some indication of what Maggie was capable of. Tonight that guilt gnaws at my stomach. Ben and Maggie graduated one year and two months ago. I go over and over that time, trying to find the clues, the foreshadowing.
    It isn’t there, or I can’t see it.
    They graduated. Maggie got a job at an old people’s home near her house. Ben took a gap year because he wasn’t sure about college—where to go, what to study, or even if it was for him. When it came down to it, Ben was as desperate to escape as I was. Not just Gant, though. Ben wanted to escape the neatly laid road at his feet. College. Job. Someday a family and house in a place like Gant.
    As a freshman he’d liked this perky blonde in the Amigos Club, and because of her, he’d gone with them on a trip to dig a well inGuatemala. He departed home talking only about how hot she